Dump a couple of thousand cranky reporters in one place, give them a reason to gripe, equip the horde with insta-bitch social media and the outcome is precisely what’s happened here in recent days.
A disaster!
The Olympics haven’t even begun but the reviews for Sochi 2014 are already in: WORST. GAMES. EVER.
Or worst Games since Vancouver 2010, which had also yet to launch before snotty British journos pronounced them a calamity. Those sodden Olympics — booze and rain — were dubbed The Drunkest Games in history because reporters had to navigate their way home nightly through The River of Vomit that was Granville Street.
Previously Beijing had been declared The Worst Games Ever. And before that, Athens — which really did take the medal for chaos in their slapdash unfinished state.
Strictly come romancing, these Games have not brought the love from front-line sports correspondents who have perhaps become too accustomed to four-star hotels, room service and concierges.
Sochi 2014 Olympics: ‘Worst. Games. Ever?’ No, pampered journalists should just chill: DiManno
It’s almost a tradition to dub each Olympics ‘The Worst Games Ever.’ But Rosie DiManno, who has been to 13 Olympics, writes that preparations for the Sochi Games are on par with all the others she’s covered for the Toronto Star.
http://www.thestar.com/sports/sochi2014/2014/02/05/sochi_2014_olympics_worse_games_ever_no_pampered_journalists_should_just_chill_dimanno.html
Dump a couple of thousand cranky reporters in one place, give them a reason to gripe, equip the horde with insta-bitch social media and the outcome is precisely what’s happened here in recent days.
A disaster!
The Olympics haven’t even begun but the reviews for Sochi 2014 are already in: WORST. GAMES. EVER.
Or worst Games since Vancouver 2010, which had also yet to launch before snotty British journos pronounced them a calamity. Those sodden Olympics — booze and rain — were dubbed The Drunkest Games in history because reporters had to navigate their way home nightly through The River of Vomit that was Granville Street.
Previously Beijing had been declared The Worst Games Ever. And before that, Athens — which really did take the medal for chaos in their slapdash unfinished state.
Strictly come romancing, these Games have not brought the love from front-line sports correspondents who have perhaps become too accustomed to four-star hotels, room service and concierges.
Most of us arrived here in the middle of the night and with noses out of joint due to long-haul flights, missed connections, lost baggage, rumbling stomachs, few English-speaking volunteers and not a whole lot to report on before competition begins. So we made ourselves the story, which was at least a switch from hand-wringing over security concerns and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.
The grumbling isn’t entirely without justification. The media village — a cluster of hotels just outside Olympic Park — was not show-time ready. At least two of the nine hotels were decidedly un-ready: no heat, no shower curtains, no hot water, a warning in one case not to apply any of the water that came out of the taps to one’s face because “it contains something very dangerous.”
Some incoming media found their rooms — booked and paid for months ago — already occupied, missing chairs, pillows, lights, TVs, units strewn with detritus and, in a startling instance, with a stray dog in situ. This is not stuff you want to confront at 3 o’clock in the morning, zonked out from jet fatigue.
Reporters have been bartering for what they need, swapping light bulbs for functioning door handles. A heads-up was tweeted to beware of manholes without covers.
Particularly perplexing to foreigners was the bathroom admonition not to flush toilet paper down the toilet. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with toilet paper? Well, not in many parts of the world — including the developed world — where over-taxed plumbing systems can’t handle the clog and it’s customary to dispose of tissue paper by other means. Big deal. Yet too many journalists of all nationalities turn into Ugly Americans when venturing beyond their comfort zone.
Naturally, because reporters tend towards utter self-absorption, these kinks became matters of Twitterverse urgency and purple-prose melodrama.
The Olympics are all about us, no? Uh, no.
Preparations for the Games — by which I mean superficial details, the landscaping around venues, aesthetic details — are not what they should have been but pretty much as they’ve always been in the 13 Olympics I’ve covered. Mounds of debris, parts of roads unpaved, mesh hoarding to hide the eyesore bits, lots of trash, unreliable power — nothing upsets journalists more than an Internet that goes up and down — these have all featured in Olympics over the past three decades, as the Games have grown too big, too gaudy and too complicated.
The sky is always falling as the clock ticks down — and then it doesn’t.
“According to our information, right now 24,000 rooms have been delivered and 97 per cent of them are without any problem,” IOC president Thomas Bach told reporters after touring the Athletes’ Village. (That refers to rooms built in dozens of new hotels for tourists, not just journalists.)
“The remaining three per cent have still some issues to be settled.”
Sochi ran into well-documented problems because organizers — and here I mean President Vladimir Putin, because these Games are entirely his baby — parcelled off mega construction projects to state companies and his tycoon pals, some of whom had no experience with such a massive transformational undertaking. And Sochi was the biggest construction site in the world over the last seven years.
The construction oligarch put in charging of building the ski jump facility, for instance, was fired by Putin a year ago when the venue’s cost had increased eight-fold, though largely because it was built over wet soil and tectonic plates that induced mudslides.
That’s but one example to explain why these Games have come in at least $30 billion over budget. There’s even a website — Champions of the Corruption Race — that catalogues the political back-story for every Olympic construction site.
But what’s not been given much attention is that few — if any — athletes have complained, either about their residential village or the sports venues.
All of those venues were completed more than a year ago, have been tested, and many already used in competition over the past 12 months. There were, last winter, legitimate concerns expressed about poor ice maintenance on the sliding track, which was causing bumpy rides down the chute. But that has been corrected. Snow — the absence of it, which so plagued snowboarding events in Vancouver — has been stockpiled: 1.5 million cubic feet of it.
All the athletes I’ve spoken to — figure skaters, women’s hockey players, bobsledders — have raved about the facilities. Doubtless when the NHLers arrive, they won’t be thrilled with three narrow beds to a room, the Lilliputian bedside lamps and the shared bathrooms. But hockey players are not spoiled basketball pros; they’re unlikely to make a fuss. They want to be here.
The journalists however, I’m not so sure.
Perhaps I’d be more empathetic if my room was freezing and my bed only five-feet long, as some of my colleagues claim. I was simply thrilled to discover an ashtray on the desk and a smoke-friendly environment. Now if only somebody would shut off that damn late-night Russian music outside my window.
But the Olympics are no country for old sissies. So I’ll take my own advice: Just chill.